Contemporary laundry treating appliances have a number of pre-programmed cycles of operation. The cycles of operation may be selected by the appliance based on user's settings or may be manually set by a user. Once the cycle is selected, a controller for the laundry treating appliance controls the actuation of the various components to implement the cycle of operation. For those treating appliances having a rotating drum defining a treating chamber, the controller actuates a motor to rotate the drum at one or more predetermined set speeds in accordance with the needs of the different phases of the cycle of operation.
In most treating appliances process parameters for an operation process of a laundry treating appliance may be set based on the laundry load size. In some laundry treating appliances, the user manually inputs a qualitative laundry load size (extra-small, small, medium, large, extra-large, etc.), in other treating appliances, the treating appliance automatically determines the laundry load size.
Historically, contemporary appliances do not take into account the distribution of the laundry load within a rotating drum of the appliance. That distribution may change during the cycle of operation influencing the effectiveness of a particular phase of the cycle or even an overall performance of treating appliance.